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Most of our services are in Go, and thanks to the fact that compiled Go binaries are mostly-statically linked by default, it’s possible to create containers with very few files within. It’s surely possible to use these techniques to create tighter containers for other languages that need more runtime support, but for this post I’m only focusing on Go apps.

Enabling Multipath TCP on the smartphone is the first step in deploying it. However, this is not sufficient since there are very few servers that support Multipath TCP today. To enable their users to benefit from Multipath TCP for all the applications that they use, KT has opted for a SOCKSv5 proxy. This proxy is running on x86 servers using release 0.89.5 of the open-source Multipath TCP implementation in the Linux kernel. During the presentation, SungHoon Seo mentioned that despite the recent rollout of the service, there were already 5,500 active users on the SOCKS proxy the last time he checked. Thanks to this proxy, the subscribes of the Giga Path service in Korea can benefit from Multipath TCP with all the TCP-based applications that they use.

On August 1, Artyom Zorin had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final release of his Zorin OS 10 GNU/Linux operating system, distributed as Core and Ultimate editions, based on Ubuntu 15.04.

Systems administrators: They keep our high-tech world up and running. From capacity planning, to 3 a.m. phone calls, to retiring that 10-year-old server that uses more power than your whole house, sys admins do it all. Open source communities would not be able to thrive without the networks, services, and tools that allow for communication and collaboration, and sys admins are the ones who work thanklessly year-round to keep them going.

July 31 is System Administrator Appreciation Day, a day for all of us to express our undying gratitude for sys admins. Sure, you could buy your favorite sys admin cake and ice cream, or perhaps a nice gift card. You could even go as far as not breaking the server for just one day. You also can follow these 30 sys admins.

Solus OS is a Linux distro that was built from scratch and uses a new desktop environment called Budgie. You can consider it as the next version of the Solus OS as it was built by the same developer team, so they didn’t bother changing the name for a new operating system.

Ubuntu MATE, the latest member of the Ubuntu family, has been spotted running on the MK808B Plus Quad-Core mini TV box device. The device runs with Android 4.4 by default, but a third party developer has tweaked it to run Ubuntu.

We spoke to Bhavana Srinivas and Geremy Cohen from PubNub about their LEGO Smart Home model, a proof of concept project that shows how you can use the Raspberry Pi with communication platform PubNub in order to automate your household electronics and other Internet of Things devices. You can read the full piece in the latest issue.

Wow, it sure was a busy Thursday in the news feeds today. Windows 10 is getting a lot of headlines, some right in Open Source World. The Free Software Foundation issued a public statement urging folks to reject Windows 10 and LinuxBSDos.com advised dual-boot upgraders. The CEO of Mozilla even posted an open letter to Microsoft CEO concerning Windows 10. Elsewhere, Christine Hall blogged about the advancement of artificial intelligence, a LibreOffice update was announced, and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his pick of top five heros of Linux.

Lennart Poettering, the creator of the controversial init system and service manager for Linux kernel-based operating systems, has had the great pleasure of announcing the first system conference event.

There's also some tests that run fine under the Intel Windows 10 driver but not the Intel Linux driver at this time. As a reminder, the Intel Windows driver exposes OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 2.0 support while at the moment the Intel driver exposes OpenGL 3.3 (but 4.0~4.1 in the coming days) and OpenCL 1.2.

These results were interesting for our first Windows 10 benchmarks, albeit the Intel Linux driver ended up being a little bit slower than the Intel closed-source Windows driver in many of these OpenGL tests.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has received a top Growth Style score from Zack’s Research. The growth score is based on company financials as well as the company’s prospects for future growth. The score is a result of analysis of various aspects of the Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement and Income Statement. Stocks that are given a high growth score tend to have the characteristics resulting in market outperformance.

We are working on getting plasma-desktop to transition to testing as soon as possible (hopefully in 2 days time), which will resolve both those issues. We appreciate that the transition to KF5 is much rougher than we would have liked, and apologize to all those impacted.

Canonical, through Martin Wimpress, announced on July 30 that the second and last Alpha builds of the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Cloud 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating systems were available for download and testing.

For those interested in porting HTML5 games to Ubuntu Phone, Alan Pope has written a blog post about this relatively easy process. With having a redistributable HTML5 game, the "porting" to Ubuntu Phone mostly comes down to packaging it up via creating the manifest JSON file, adding a security profile, making a standard desktop file, building the resulting Click package, and then testing it out on an Ubuntu device -- followed by ultimately uploading it to the Ubuntu Store.

The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Things (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced that Philips has joined as a premier member. Philips joins more than 170 members of the AllSeen Alliance, including premier members Canon, Electrolux, Haier, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Qeo (a Technicolor company), Qualcomm Connected Experiences, Inc., Sharp, Silicon Image (a Lattice Semiconductor company) and Sony.

After what now seems forever on a Windows based OS (most recently, XP and 7 for desktops, Vista for laptop), I decided to move away from XP and install Zorin OS 8 core. Although I am still on a learning curve, I cannot stress enough how much I love the OS and have not had a moment of wanting to go back to any Windows version.

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit your needs, says Meine in his article How to choose the best Linux desktop for you. But what about altering the look and feel?

Following years of waning popularity, the Debian GNU/Linux Project has dropped support for the Sparc architecture, effective immediately.

"As Sparc isn't exactly the most alive architecture anymore," Debian maintainer Joerg Jaspert wrote in a mailing list post last week, "not in [Debian 8.x] jessie and unlikely to be in [Debian 9] stretch, I am going to remove it from the archive this weekend."

The MakerWare I run on Ubuntu works well. I wish they were correctly signing their repositories. Even if I use non-SSL to fetch their key, as their Ubuntu/Debian instructions recommend, it still doesn’t match the packages:

Chromebooks have become incredibly popular among some users, as you can see from Amazon's list of bestselling Chromebooks. One user decided to use a Chromebook as his primary computing device for three months, and found that it worked extremely well for him.

[...]

Debian Linux is known as a distribution that supports lots of different hardware, but now the Debian developers have announced the removal of support for the SPARC hardware architecture.

Jonathan Riddell said the hacking was frustrating at first, but Martin Gräßlin was able to get the system going with Wayland and KWin. Gräßlin said Plasma Mobile is the first product to use Wayland by default and the only reason Wayland is mature enough to be included as a technical preview in upcoming Plasma 5.4. They're confident Android apps will run on it at some point as well.

With loads of help from people on #kde-devel, we finally managed to complete the KDE Network Filesharing port to KF5. Wasn’t easy, given that this was my first time porting frameworks, but it was real fun. Apart from apol’s blogpost shared in my last post, here’s another post that was immensely helpful to me while porting: Porting a KControl Module to KF5.

On July 26, Arne Exton, the creator of numerous distributions of GNU/Linux as well as various Android-x86 Live DVDs, was more than proud to announce the immediate availability for download of a new build for his ExLight Linux distribution.

I’ve recently set up a Fedora 22 firewall/router at home (more on that later) and I noticed that remote ssh logins were extremely slow. In addition, sudo commands seemed to stall out for the same amount of time (about 25-30 seconds).

While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives.

It has occurred to me that not learning Unix is a grave mistake. My relatively early exposure to Unix was important. I may not have appreciated Linux as much or even at all if I hadn't had that ability to experiment at home with Xenix. Learning about Unix develops new mental muscles like playing a musical instrument or learning a new language. But learning these new processes becomes more difficult with age. To me the exact technical details are less important. It does not really matter if you are a Linux user or if you use one of the BSDs or even something more exotic like Plan 9. The important thing is you can learn new concepts from what I will broadly refer to as the Unix/Internet Community.

Google is no longer forcing Google+ on the world: people will be able to log into YouTube, and other Googley services, without having to create mandatory Google+ profiles.

From now on, only those who deliberately sign up for Google+ will create profiles on the ghost town of a social network. Previously, Google harassed users of YouTube, Gmail and so on, to convert their accounts into Google+ accounts, a move obviously designed to boost G+'s sad numbers. It didn't go down very well at all – a lot of folks hated it.

While it's been several months since the Purism Librem crowd-funding campaing got underway for producing "the first high-end laptop in the world that ships without mystery software in the kernel, operating system, or any software applications," the Librem 15 still relies upon a proprietary BIOS and there's still no easy fix.

The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of a country-specific pricing for its Essentials of System Administration course and Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator exam for people in India. India is the first region in which the Linux Foundation will offer country-specific pricing on select training and certification products. The course plus exam will cost Indian credit/debit card holders 5,000 rupees which is equivalent to $79.

The Second step has finished June 26. But I prepared several exams in early July and went to Beijing to apply the Visa for GUADEC and had a travel in Beijing. So I was a little busy in the past few days. Now I'd like to spend sometime to write this blog and share something I learned during the second step of my plan.

The Intel Compute Stick is a tiny PC that plugs directly into the HDMI port on your TV or monitor. A model with Windows software launched earlier this year for $150. Now you can buy a model with Ubuntu Linux for $100.

Earlier this week I finished up a 15-way AMD/NVIDIA graphics card comparison on Linux with the very latest proprietary Linux drivers. That earlier article focused on the OpenGL performance and simply put the Catalyst performance on the tested Radeon hardware was abysmal compared to NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. However, there is one area where the Catalyst Linux driver really excels at performance and routinely beats out the green competition.

As you may know, Dolphin Emulator is an open-source, multi-platform Nintendo GameCube, Wii and Triforce emulator. Like all the emulated software, the games have minor bugs and issues. Being an open-source project, it may be improved by third party developers.

In the last part, I glued the paper templates for the shield and foot onto the wood. Now comes the part that is hardest for me: excavating the foot pieces in the dark wood so the light-colored ones can fit in them. I'm not a woodcarver, just a lousy joiner, and I have a lot to learn!

DeMaio quoted Richard Brown, chairman of the openSUSE board, saying, "The opportunity for topping this SLE core with the things you want in a long-term release really makes this attractive and I see people wanting to get involved with this next chapter of openSUSE. Leap will fill the gap between the longevity of a SLE core and the innovation related to Tumbleweed."

OpenSUSE 42.1 Leap is derived from SUSE Linux Enterprise's source-code and is going to be the openSUSE project's next non-rolling release and entered development last month. Currently Leap is due for release in November. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling-release arm of the distribution, will meanwhile keep on rolling.

That updated version 44.0.2403.107 may have to wait, because I will be unable to do a lot of Slackware related stuff until august; real life is catching up with me. If there are real useability issues with 44.0.2403.89, let me know and I will see if I can shift priorities or make the older 43.x packages available again. My initial (not exhaustive) testing showed no weirdness at least.

Speaking of schedules, Fedora 23 development is well underway. Last week, Fedora 23 branched from Rawhide, so that we can focus on stabilization and bugfixes for the planned October release while ongoing work on future features — Fedora 24 and beyond! — can continue in the development branch. The Alpha Freeze (where F23 features and changes are supposed to be substantially complete and testable) is scheduled for a week from today, with the actual Alpha release August 11th — the day before Flock starts. The QA team is already working on early test candidates, and Docs has put out a call for help with release notes.

We reported the other day that Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project has published news about some of the upcoming work that will be done for the acclaimed GNU/Linux operating system based on Ubuntu.

MontaVista Software has launched an Internet of Things version of its commercial MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) development platform. The new Yocto Linux-based MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade eXpress (CGX) distribution will be available in the fourth quarter in a scaled down CGX Foundation optimized for IoT products. Customers can then add profiles including Carrier Grade and Virtualization in modular fashion.

Smart TVs are becoming the central point of our communications in the modern Smart home. They can entertain and increasingly provide us with important information, and living in the UK it doesn’t get more Important than the weather for me.

Get your facts straight before reporting, is the main takeaway from Peter Hansteen's latest piece, The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn't. OpenSSH servers that are set up to use PAM for authentication and with a very specific (non-default on OpenBSD and most other places) setup are in fact vulnerable, and fixing the configuration is trivial.

In the weeks since the Hacking Team breach, the spotlight has shone squarely on the small and often shadowy companies that are in the business of buying and selling exploits and vulnerabilities. One such company, Netragard, this week decided to get out of that business after its dealings with Hacking Team were exposed. But now there’s a new entrant in the field, Zerodium, and there are some familiar names behind it.

The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software, has been updated to version 2.33. It's one of the smallest updates, and it's just here to bring support for an important new device and deliver a few small changes.

In 2015, we see the huge sluggishness of Wintel markets. This will motivate retailers to seek other solutions. Better GNU/Linux on those retail shelves than a product that’s not selling… Last Christmas was a wake-up call for retailers. GNU/Linux sold well, and “8.1” did not. Q1 of 2015 showed huge increases in usage of GNU/Linux according to web-stats. When school resumes in the north, I expect more increases. Then, what worked last Christmas will work again. 2015 will be the last year we see reluctance on the part of retailers to sell GNU/Linux. They’ve seen what Android/Linux has done. They will be ready to give GNU/Linux a try on the desktops. The OEMs are OK with whatever ships because the lock-in to M$ is gone. US DOJ v M$ and EU v M$ fixed that.

If you talk with software developers, sooner or later the topic drifts to tools. The most obvious one is the editor. People really love their editors and are happy to talk about the wonderful features they have and how they increase productivity. The second tool is the compiler, which also receive a lot of praise. The compilers we have today are massively better, faster and more powerful than ones from just 10 years ago. And then there’s the build systems, which are, well…

We reported the other day that the openSUSE Project had plans on publishing the first development milestone of their anticipated openSUSE Leap 42.1 operating system, which promises to change the openSUSE Linux distribution as we know it.

It was discovered that the libuser library contains two vulnerabilities which, in combination, allow unprivileged local users to gain root privileges. libuser is a library that provides read and write access to files like /etc/passwd, which constitute the system user and group database. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux it is a central system component.

Five years after the OpenGL 4.0 specification was introduced, the open-source Mesa 3D project has finally moved on to supporting the necessary extensions, the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver even exposes OpenGL 4.1 support this morning, and OpenGL 4.2 patches are pending.

Wldbg supports a few different modes of operation from taking a list of modules and running functions on those modules for each message going through the Wayland function, there's also a GDB-like interface for debugging Wayland clients, and there's also a server mode for overtaking the bound socket and accepting all new connections.

The news today of OpenGL 4 finally being accomplished in Mesa/Gallium3D is quite ironic and memorable as this day five years ago was when the R600 Gallium3D driver reached the milestone of being able to run glxgears on AMD hardware.

While a milestone release of Leap has been imminent, it's not coming out today as hoped for. Partially causing the delay is that Leap is moving over to the Linux 4.1 kernel than their previous Linux 3.x base.

Red Hat, the king of Linux and open source world; the only fully open source company to bag over a billion dollars in revenue, has announced the general availability of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.7, the latest update to RHEL 6 platform.

Customers who hired the infamous ID theft-protection firm Lifelock to monitor their identities after their data was stolen in a breach were in for a surprise. It turns out Lifelock failed to properly secure their data.

More in Tux Machines

Leftovers: Gaming

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor was by far one of the best games of 2014. With great combat, abilities, and a really interesting Nemesis system, I was really surprised by what I was expecting to be a pretty generic Batman: Arkham Mordor rip-off.

Evoland developers Shiro Games recently announced the release date for the anticipated sequel, and though there's no firm release date for Linux yet, it shouldn't be far behind the Windows release. If you didn't catch the great looking trailer when we last wrote about Evoland 2, here it is again for you to enjoy:

Codename CURE is a reasonable well rated first-person shooter on Steam, and it has been updated to include a Linux version.
The game is free to play, so you lose nothing by trying it. It has quite lot of positive reviews going for it too, if you trust user reviews.

It's not often I get over excited about a game, and I'm not entirely sure how this flew under my radar, but Shallow Space looks seriously good. You can pre-order now for $15 which will give you access to early builds when they are available. We never recommend pre-ordering, but this looks like it could be a safe bet since it already has Linux builds available.

KDE and Akademy

At this year’s KDE conference Akademy, I was working on a small plasmoid to continuously track the disk quota.
The disk quota is usually used in enterprise installations where network shares are mounted locally. Typically, sysadmins want to avoid that users copy lots of data into their folders, and therefor set quotas (the quota limit has nothing to do with the physical size of a partition). Typically, once a user gets over the hard limit of the quota, the account is blocked and the user cannot login anymore. This happens from time to time, since the users are not really aware of the current quota limit and the already used disk space.

A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch). It’s changed again. All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won’t be entirely smooth, which we’ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we’ve had for the last several days.

Red Hat and Fedora

Open source users flock to Red Hat for enterprise support, but not all subscribers like the way the company handles IT issues.
The company recently launched an updated support service. User experience is important to Red Hat Inc., and it dedicated its day-three keynote at the Red Hat Summit last month to its support.

Several research firms have weighed in on RHT. Northland Securities reissued a “buy” rating and set a $92.00 target price (up from $85.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Northland Capital Partners upped their price objective on Red Hat from $85.00 to $92.00 in a report on Thursday, June 25th. Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Friday, June 26th. Deutsche Bank restated a “hold” rating and set a $75.00 price objective (up from $70.00) on shares of Red Hat in a research report on Thursday, July 2nd. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed an “overweight” rating and issued a $85.00 target price (up previously from $82.00) on shares of Red Hat in a report on Thursday, July 2nd.

So the schedule for Flock is finally fixed and I have to update some things according to my last post. First the practical part of the Wallpaper Hunt is scheduled now for Friday now instead of Satruday. Addionally I will help Máirín Duffy on Saturday morning with the Inkscape and GIMP Bootcamp, guess which part I will do.

Few days back I wrote about a locally built Fedora 22 image which has systemd-networkd handling the network configuration. You can test that image locally on your system, or on an Openstack Cloud. In case you want to test the same on AWS, we now have two AMI(s) for the same, one in the us-west-1, and the other in ap-southeast-1. Details about the AMI(s) are below:

Leftovers: Debian

Hi all,
I just looked back on the Halloween Documents, specifically
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . Here are two quotes
I find both interesting and timely:
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server
applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized,
simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new
protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
So next time one of the new breed calls you a neckbeard for helping
build a distro with simple protocols and services, show him
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html . And try not to
laugh when the whole thing goes right over his head.

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.